Darker than it looks

High art it is not, but Andrey Bartenev’s garish, disco-themed display has hidden depths

Ihave never been to Norilsk, and never want to, but to gain some better understanding of what Andrey Bartenev is seeking to communicate with his noisy and lurid disco art - and to recognise some profundity in it when, on the face of it, there does not appear to be any - you need, perhaps, to know something about Norilsk. It is Bartenev's birthplace. And I am not sure I can imagine a less comely home town.

Norilsk, in Siberia, is the northernmost city on the planet, and one of only two cities, the other being Yakutsk, in the permafrost zone inside the Arctic Circle. The average temperature here is -10C, but sometimes it drops to -58C. For 250 days of the year the city is under snow. When the polar night sets in at the beginning of December, the citizens of Norilsk do not get to see the sun again until